The role of renewable energy and urbanization towards greenhouse gas emission in top Asian countries: Evidence from advance panel estimations

Abstract

The increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and environmental degradation (ED) is a serious concern for the various economies, and a similar issue is observed in Asia. This paper investigated the role of clean energy from renewable sources, urbanization, and economic growth in determining the level of GHG emissions from 1995 to 2018 for ten Asian States through a cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lagged (CS-ARDL) model. Meanwhile, the current research also examined the cross-sectional dependence, unit root properties, and co-integration between the study variables. The study findings confirmed that clean energy and GDP2 played their constructive role in reducing GHG emissions in the natural environment or targeted economies. In contrast, urbanization and economic growth caused more GHG emissions both in the long and short run. Furthermore, the robust check through augmented mean group (AMG) and common correlated effect means group (CCEMG) also confirmed that clean energy and GDP2 have a good sign for lowering ED compared to GDP and urbanization. The study findings could support policymakers, specifically in the field of energy economics and environmental sustainability. Therefore, it is highly recommended that some strong policy implications are needed to reduce environmental issues through controlling the negative impact of economic growth and urbanization. This study contributes in the literature of GHG emission with respect to economic growth, urbanization and clean energy and guided the regulators while formulating policies related to control the GHG emission.